Home › Books › This Body I Wore: A Memoir
This Body I Wore: A Memoir
by
74/99
Critics' Rating Index
69/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
51/99
Volume of Reviews
43/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
A captivating memoir of one woman's long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her. "A universal and profound meditation on the price of authenticity." --Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and Good Boy Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn't even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch's This Body I Wore chronicles one woman's long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. "How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential truth about yourself and still not see it?" This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the crossdressing subculture of New York in the 1980s and '90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many of them would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history. Goetsch has not written a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?
Reviews
"Told with unique eloquence and tenderness, the memoir follows the emotional and physical transition of someone who spent 50 years living in someone else's skin ..."
"Goetsch fashions a brilliant and tapestried story of her late-in-life gender transition ..."
"But perhaps more importantly, the hard-won wisdom contained in This Body I Wore offers a new generation of trans and nonbinary youth a guiding hand from a previous generation."
"Goetsch recalls periods and important locations in her life with rich, compelling detail, but sometimes her revelries are sprawling and unevenly paced."
"Goetsch has a poetic sensibility that illuminates without simplifying ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!